Abstract
Even if, year after year, traffic congestion is becoming more and more unsustainable, governments stubbornly commit the solution of the problem to the same people who have caused it. Civil engineering applied to all traffic problems has become the proxy of a missing ideology. Traffic and transportation plans are elaborated only by civil engineers who determine how urban mobility policies are to be conceived. Hence, the problem is set around solutions that are known and chosen prior to any open analysis. It is apparent that civil engineers have not been able to solve the problem in the last 40 years, but in this period they have established and reinforced powerful professional guilds which intertwine with industrial and political lobbies. The solutions they apply to traffic are likely to be the real cause of traffic problems. However, contemporary mobility policy also embraces issues such as: (a) health risks; (b) environmental responsibility for global warming; (c) social justice which regards how mobility-related risks, costs and benefits are distributed; (d) economic justice concerning the appropriation and redistribution of public monies. It also concerns an epistemic analysis regarding knowledge, science and the use of professional skills and competences. If we apply new concepts in cost-benefit analyses assessing the effectiveness of traffic plans, we would be able to achieve better results. We would understand that public and private decision-making is trapped in a vicious circle that involves an escalation of traffic, similar to the inflation process. It is exactly the opposite of what should be done, i.e. preparing a traffic reduction sequence. Traffic inflation is induced by the transportation and infrastructure industry’s need to continuously grow. These considerations support two final proposals on how to approach traffic policy in an alternative way.
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Notes
- 1.
I must confess that I was not very polite in arguing their beliefs in that occasion. At a convivial dinner party people legitimately want to relax and repeat idly their biases and their convictions. The problem is that prejudices and lies, if too often repeated, become half-truths and an utterly shared discourse.
- 2.
Note that, assuming that a project really exists “somewhere else” is the opposite of a utopia in which case you assume that the imagined project exists in “no-place”, thus it is absolutely original.
- 3.
I will return to the best practices issue in Chaps. 4 and 6. The Utopian approach has been typically held in great contempt by materialist and Marxist philosophers who endorsed the famous Marx’s 11th thesis on Feuerbach which goes: “the philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.” The Frankfurt School has tried to rehabilitate the notion of Utopia as a change tool. According to Horkheimer, Utopia has two main meanings: a critique of the current situation and a project for the future. “The materialist longing to grasp the thing aims at the opposite: it is in the absence of images that the full object could be conceived. Such absence concurs with the theological ban on images. Materialism brought that ban into secular form by not permitting Utopia to be pictured; this is the substance of its negativity. At its most materialistic, materialism comes to agree with theology” (from Adorno’s Negative Thinking, quoted in Benzaquen 1998).
- 4.
In customary discourse, which is mostly derived from economics, we assign the economic good only the so called “use value”, that means we value it according to its immediate capability to satisfy some of our needs. In environmental studies, and specifically in environmental ethics, other values are typically considered, i.e. precautionary, inherent, intrinsic and existence values. See Singer (1991) and an abundant specialized bibliography. The importance of economic values besides use values have been treated by pioneer ecological economists such as Kenneth Boulding, Nicholas Georgescu-Rougen (1971), and Herman Daly just to quote some of them.
- 5.
In 2000, I was in charge of a cost-risk-benefit analysis regarding the construction of a dam and a reservoir in the Alps. The project was very controversial: as expected it was opposed by environmentalists and supported by industrialists. The situation was even more complicated because part of the valleys’ population was favorable and so were some of the local governments involved. I suggested that the commissioners hire a moral philosopher to help in devising a coping-strategy and solving the decision-making problem. They (surprisingly) accepted. First, I asked the ethicist to identify the moral values involved in the decision-making. Moral values were implicit in the assessment of impacts on the natural and human environment (environmental ethics), in “who had the right to decide” (political ethics) and in cost, risk and benefits distribution (social justice). I also asked the philosopher to describe and predict the parties’ conduct according to the values that they were not capable of expressing rationally but which were heavily affecting their behaviors. In this way I could understand the consistency of their behavior and it became predictable. In raising the question to the applied ethicist and in locating his competence in the planning team, I was inspired by Shrader-Frechette (1991). Then, I asked the moral philosopher to help create a shared language so as to ease the dialogue. The experiment was successful, although I realized that: (a) we still lack applied ethicists who are properly trained to deal with activists, professionals and decision-makers; (b) activists, professionals and decision-makers are not used to speaking the language of moral philosophy because their beliefs and languages are heavily value-loaded, but they do not realize it and prefer to use their familiar technology notions.
- 6.
See the rich literature about advocacy planning and citizen participation. Between the 1960s and the 1980s, this literature was mainly focused on social justice, then the environmental issues have come into the limelight.
- 7.
The specialist reader can easily conjecture how this part is directly inspired by Michel Crozier’s research on bureaucracies and system behavior (Crozier and Friedberg 1980). “Forget about solutions” and “Learn thinking differently” are Crozier’s mottos meant to change inefficient bureaucracies and social systems. It is easy to recall also how traffic was one of Herbert Simon’s main sources of inspiration, although his “solution” goes in a different direction: i.e. system analysis rather than the socio-political approach. See also Crozier (1995).
- 8.
Arguments about the Moon and the ghetto paradox was common in political science during the 1970s. See Nelson (1977).
- 9.
See, e.g., Richmond (2006), who describes the case of the light-rail construction in Los Angeles, proves with an abundant argumentation and exhaustive documentation how useless “solutions” can be realized just because they are well politically marketed.
- 10.
Below, I will argue that their actions were morally reprehensible although they were not corrupted according to the common understanding of the word.
- 11.
- 12.
I have treated this issue extensively in a recent essay published in Italian (Poli 2009).
- 13.
In academic and professional organizations, transportation engineering is traditionally a branch of civil engineering.
- 14.
This approach has noble roots in the positivist belief that approaches the understanding of society as an object of scientific observation and consider social science as a technological product. The classic critique to this approach emerges clearly in the famous Habermas-Luhmann debate (1971).
- 15.
In the 1970s and the 1980s environmental studies were innovative as previously described in Chap. 2. At that time environment economists made a consistent research effort to re-adapt the political economy scientific approach to the new situation. They elaborated sophisticated evaluation and assessment methods which included environmental values. Also statisticians cooperated in this effort to calculate more precisely the welfare and the real value added created by human action. It was proposed that companies and governments approve environmental budgets along with financial ones. Unfortunately, this generous intellectual effort did not produce widespread applications and the models elaborated have not been introduced neither to support decision-making nor as a political strategy to prove the presumed overall negative impacts of the new constructions. This valuable research was not allowed to leave academies, thus it was never commonly applied and even less created a political discourse. Eventually it lost popularity also in academies.
- 16.
As a matter of fact, in most affluent countries, civil engineers have been asked to develop and apply techniques to reduce impact and people’s discomfort during the construction phases. However, in very few cases and only after very strong protests, has an infrastructure project been rejected for the reason that it would have bothered residents during the construction period. The bias that any new construction is good per se and adds to the general welfare for the time coming is not likely to be questioned.
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Poli, C. (2011). Technologies, Problems, Solutions. In: Mobility and Environment. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1220-1_3
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